> Back in the day, I remember writing reddit comments and blog posts to explain the relative popularity of Rails over Catalyst. It was usually along the lines of, "people want to be told what to do. given a screw, they would rather bash it in with a hammer than to read about what a screwdriver is." Posts like this reinforce that point: people don't use Rails because they want to use Rails, people use it because they're afraid of anything else. Rails gave them everything that they thought they needed, and no easy way to back out of the defaults. It was a comfortable world where you could never do something wrong. Now that Rails is becoming a meta-framework like Catalyst, people are being driven away because they have to think before they program, and they have to customize Rails into the framework they want instead of just using the framework that dhh wants.
Just the other day I was writing a similar piece about Django on my blog. Back in the day it used to be damn-simple to start a Django project (compared to starting a Zope project, for example). Download the thing, change a line or two in settings.py, and you were done. No need to worry about what ORM was Django using or about how some people thought that the templateing system was un-pythonic. Things just worked.
Now I see that more and more people decry the fact that Django is not "modular" enough or that you cannot change its default ORM with any other one just by editing one line of code. Guess what? Your boss or the client doesn't care one bit about the virtues of SQLAlchemy compared to Django's default ORM, they only want to know how long it will take for you to implement the features they want. Now, if you, as a programmer, have enough spare time to handle all the loose bits (custom ORM, better templateing systems, custom URL dispatch mechanisms etc.) then chances are you shouldn't be using an existing web-framework (like Django, for example), and that you should build your own. But don't forget to finish your projects on time.
And, for anyone interested, here's Martijn Faassen's recent Euro DjangoCon keynote about what Django could learn from Zope: http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2011/06/07/zope.html . The thing is, I'm old enough to remember about how Zope 3 was supposed to be the "best Python web-framework ever. It lets you do everything you want, you just have to understand interfaces". Six years on, and nobody cares anymore.
Just the other day I was writing a similar piece about Django on my blog. Back in the day it used to be damn-simple to start a Django project (compared to starting a Zope project, for example). Download the thing, change a line or two in settings.py, and you were done. No need to worry about what ORM was Django using or about how some people thought that the templateing system was un-pythonic. Things just worked.
Now I see that more and more people decry the fact that Django is not "modular" enough or that you cannot change its default ORM with any other one just by editing one line of code. Guess what? Your boss or the client doesn't care one bit about the virtues of SQLAlchemy compared to Django's default ORM, they only want to know how long it will take for you to implement the features they want. Now, if you, as a programmer, have enough spare time to handle all the loose bits (custom ORM, better templateing systems, custom URL dispatch mechanisms etc.) then chances are you shouldn't be using an existing web-framework (like Django, for example), and that you should build your own. But don't forget to finish your projects on time.
And, for anyone interested, here's Martijn Faassen's recent Euro DjangoCon keynote about what Django could learn from Zope: http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2011/06/07/zope.html . The thing is, I'm old enough to remember about how Zope 3 was supposed to be the "best Python web-framework ever. It lets you do everything you want, you just have to understand interfaces". Six years on, and nobody cares anymore.